In Quest to Understand Climate Change and Conflict, Avoid Simplification

As the war in Syria shows no signs of letting up, a recent article in Middle Eastern Studies put forward the hypothesis that the brutal conflict was triggered by government mismanagement of the country’s recent drought, which lasted from 2006 to 2010. It’s a story we’ve heard before.

I recently co-edited a special issue of Climatic Change, alongside Jon Barnett, Neil Adger, and Geoff Dabelko, in which we sought to review the recent history of climate change and conflict work published by NGOs, think-tanks and advocacy groups – the so-called “grey literature” – and highlight aspects of the nexus that had been under-researched and overshadowed so far.

Focus on Root Causes

Debate on the human security dimensions of climate change has often been cast from a deterministic perspective, where global warming will automatically translate into mass migrations, competition for resources and land, and ultimately conflict and devastation. There are two problems with this rhetoric.

The IPCC and Al Gore were awarded the Nobel Prize not for physics, but for peace

First, it risks skewing responses by states towards defensive measures and reinforcing external borders rather than addressing the root causes of the problem. When climate change was first presented as an issue for the UN Security Council to take up in 2007 (by the United Kingdom), many countries – and especially developing countries – stood against the idea, insisting it was a matter of sustainable development rather than security.

Second, claims about the impacts of climate change on conflict are insufficiently supported by scientific evidence. There are many ways by which climate change will and indeed likely already is affecting the security of populations; the IPCC recently acknowledged this through the addition of a chapter looking specifically at human security in the Fifth Assessment Report, to be released later this month. But most of the literature on the climate-conflict links, so far, has been published in the form of policy briefs or reports by NGOs, think tanks, and government agencies. And though these works have done a great job convincing the national security community that climate change will lead to conflict, they haven’t been able to provide equally convincing explanations as to why and how this might happen.

As a result, though strong statistical correlations have been observed between climate anomalies and violent conflicts, the causality for such correlations has triggered virulent debates and controversies, especially (but not only) between quantitative and qualitative studies, as argued in a recent paper by Andrew Solow.

Engage the Social Sciences

In the introduction to this special issue of Climatic Changewe argue, broadly, that attempts to understand the links between climate change and violent conflict have been accompanied by insufficient engagement of the social sciences, in particular with regard to the power imbalances associated with (and sometimes created by) climate change.

Four challenges are highlighted in particular:

First, researchers working on this nexus need to better understand not only what causes competition and conflict, but also peace and cooperation. This will allow us to design policies that foster and support cooperation, rather than just minimize risks through security responses.

We should also seek to develop explanatory models to reflect on the observed correlation between climate anomalies and conflicts. Too often we imply causality from correlation, and yet we still lack plausible models and theories for how and why certain results actually occur. This will require a greater engagement with the social sciences.

These are important questions to answer – if only to prevent a self-fulfilling prophecy

There’s a need to re-embed the issue of power into the discourse on climate and conflict. At the end of the day, vulnerability is a function of power and we need to take this into account if we want to stand a good chance of understanding how climate variables interact with the components of human security.

Finally, as I highlighted in a previous guest post, there’s only so much we can learn from the past. Yet most of what we “know” about the interactions between climate variables and security problems derives from past observations. With the possibility that global temperatures might increase by four degrees (or more) by the end of the century, there is a risk that we might reach tipping points that fundamentally change the way climate and security interact with each other.

These neglected issues constitute new challenges and should form the basis of a new research agenda. Hopefully the special issue will be a step towards better understanding how climate and security mutually influence each other and how policies can facilitate positive outcomes for these interactions.

If we’re to avoid a future of devastated homes, land, and infrastructure and more frequent terrorist attacks, which the U.S. Department of Defense’s latest Quadrennial Defense Review warned of only this month, these are important questions to answer – if only to prevent a self-fulfilling prophecy.

François Gemenne is a research fellow in political science with the University of Versailles (CEARC) and the University of Liège (CEDEM). He teaches the geopolitics of climate change at Sciences Po Paris and the Free University of Brussels, and recently guest-edited a special issue of Climatic Change with Neil Adger, Jon Barnett, and Geoff Dabelko.

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/world-population-trends-signal-dangers-aheadhttp://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-american-dream-turns-into-a-global-nightmare-2014-04-16
Our deafening silence about what is happening and why it is happening with regard to the unbridled growth of the human population on our watch serves to give consent to preternatural pseudoscience of economists and demographers that is broadcast in the mainstream media without objection. By not speaking truth to the powerful, according to the best available science and ‘lights’ we possess, we become accomplices to their ubiquitous abuses.
Extant scientific research regarding the population dynamics of Homo sapiens has to be openly acknowledged, objectively examined and honestly reported. Population scientists and ecologists have been shown to be as vulnerable to denial of apparently unforeseen and unfortunately unwelcome scientific evidence as well as to capitulation to the entreaties of all who choose favorable unscientific research to be spread by the mass media without meaningful objection from many too many members of the scientific community. It is a deliberate breach of responsibility to science and humanity for population scientists and ecologists not to object to the spreading of false knowledge and thereby, to fail in the performance of the fundamental duty of disclosing what could somehow be real and true about Homo sapiens and the workings of the existential world we inhabit, according to the best available scientific research.
Let us recognize the willful denial of the ecological science of human population dynamics. Where are the population scientists and ecologists who are ready, willing and able to attest to or refute empirical evidence that human population dynamics is essentially similar to, not different from, the population dynamics of other species; that human population numbers appear as a function of food supply; that more food for human consumption equals more people, less available food to consume equals less people and no food equals no people? No exceptions! Are these scientists blind, deaf and electively mute in the face of new scientific knowledge. Most reprehensibly, their refusal to accept responsibilities and perform duties as scientists has made it possible for pseudoscientists to fill the mainstream media with false knowledge about the way the world we inhabit works as well as about the placement of the human species within the natural order of living things.
Is it not science, and science alone, that most accurately allows us to confirm our perceptions as objective correlates of reality and truth? Without science, thought leaders and power brokers in cultures everywhere are free to widely transmit attractive ideas at will, regardless of the extent to which the ideas bear a meaningful relationship to what could be real and true. For example, a preternatural factoid like “food must be produced in order to meet the needs of a growing population” is deceitfully given credence as a scientific idea although it reflects the opposite of the actual relationship between food supply and human numbers. Findings from science indicate population numbers are the dependent variable and food the independent variable, just like the population dynamics of other species. By increasing the food supply, we are in fact growing the human population, are we not?
The idea that human exceptionalism applies to the population dynamics of Homo sapiens, that human population dynamics is different from (not essentially similar to) the population dynamics of other species, is a pseudoscientific factoid, bereft of an adequate foundation in science. Overwhelming scientific research regarding the human population indicates that human population numbers appear as a function of food supply. For many this scientific idea is on the one hand irrefutable and on the other hand unbelievable. So completely are many too many professionals enthralled by the notion of human exceptionalism. Exploding human numbers in the past 200 years are the natural result of the dramatically increasing production and distribution capabilities of food for human consumption that occurred with the onset of the Industrial Revolution and later on during the Green Revolution.
Please consider that demographers and economists are not scientists. They are presenting false knowledge that is appealing because it presents what all of us wish to believe about the way the world in which we live works as well as about the exceptional nature of the human species. Human beings are mistakenly believed to be outside (not within) the natural order of living things. The false knowledge regarding human species’ exceptionalism with regard to its population dynamics is determined de facto by whatsoever is politically convenient, economically expedient, socially desirable, religiously acceptable and culturally syntonic. Such de facto determinations of what is real about human nature and the existential world are based primarily upon ideology, not science.
Refuse to be duped by clever, absurdly enriched vendors of words and highly educated sycophants. These ‘talking heads’ duplicitously claim they are scientists and then promulgate preternatural ideas and pseudoscientific theories that are passed off as well-established results of scientific research without objection from scientists.
Let us examine the false knowledge from conventional, Neoclassical Cornucopian Economics and the Demographic Transition Theory. These theoretical perspectives are not connected to the foundation of science. The speciousness of what is presented by demographers and economists and then broadcast ubiquitously by the mainstream media is in need of correction by scientists. Ideas of endless resources availability in a finite world and an indestructible ecology that is in fact frangible are fabricated. Automatic population stabilization; a benign end to population growth soon; a glorious world by 2050 when the entire human community will reap the benefits you and I enjoy now because everyone in the human community will have entered the fourth and last stage of the demographic transition, all of these notions are fanciful and ideologically-driven. Such false knowledge as we find in the pseudoscientific disciplines of economics and demography needs to be eschewed. The best available scientific evidence must to be our guide because science stands alone as the best method by far for apprehending what could be real and true. Science needs to be categorically distinguished from all that is not science. Then, perhaps, we will be able to see more clearly how the existential world we inhabit actually works and more accurately perceive the placement of Homo sapiens within the natural order of all living things.
The imprimatur of science has been not so surreptitiously usurped by pseudoscientific disciplines in which professional research is primarily underwritten by wealthy power brokers and corporations. Economic and demographic research is designed and the findings presented so as to comport with the transparent self interests of the rich and powerful. Where are the scientists who will speak out to correct such widespread misunderstanding and reckless wrongdoing? The conscious silence of scientists serves to give consent to ubiquitous unethical professional behavior that cannot be tolerated any longer because of the confusion it engenders among those in the human community who are rightly seeking an intellectually honest understanding of the global predicament we face and a path to a sustainable future that can only be derived from the best available scientific research. The disciplines of demography and economics are prime examples of what science is not. Perhaps the findings of demographic and economics research will soon be widely recognized and consensually validated as preternatural pseudoscience.
“Speak out as if you were a million voices. It is silence that kills the world.” — St. Catherine of Siena, 1347-1380